Patterns One: Heart Beat

One of the patterns that is at the very center of our lives is the beat of the heart. Yesterday, I had a stress test in prep for surgery next week and I was surprised by how changeable it was. I have always thought of it as a very steady beat like a metronome. But as I sat perfectly still having images of my heart taken, my heart was steady and slow as I exhaled, and then speedier when I inhaled. And in a doctor's office far north of the city, sitting in room after room for solitary tests that took fifteen minutes at a time, in a hospital run by folks who seemed to care only about the expensive equipment they were running (ugly ugly rooms, with old broken things heaped on counters at the edges of rooms, no art anywhere to speak of, the only thing breaking up the expanse of drab cream colored walls that I had to stare at interminably were wide cracks in the plaster), I had a lot of time to focus on my beating heart.

Boring, grim stuff. . . but then in the middle of that boredom, I remembered the story of Ann Druyan's part in putting together the Voyager Golden Record for both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. She was part of a group of scientists (including, of course, Carl Sagan), who selected music, speeches, and sounds to record and then send into space as a representation of humankind. Heady work. And during the course of that work, she fell in love with Sagan--and him with her. Nearing the end of the project, they admitted their love for one another by getting engaged over the phone. Before their first date. Before even their first kiss. They just knew.

A few days later, Druyan was having all of the electrical impulses of her body recorded and converted to sound to include as a human physiological orchestra to include on the Voyager Golden Record--her heart beat, brainwaves, breathing. . . But those sounds were also the sounds of a woman in the new flush of love. And that's the record of human life that we have sent into the void in the hopes of intelligent life finding it and knowing us.

Bach, Brahms, Beethoven and the heart beat of a woman in love.

There's a pretty great piece about this in the Radiolab archives. It's a story that makes me teary-eyed every time I hear it. And it was a comfort to me yesterday while listening to the beepings of machines and staring at blank hospital walls.